Reimagining Water Security through the Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS), with Rob Thompson, General Manager, OC San, California

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:11] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and today my guest is Rob Thompson, General Manager at OC San or Orange County Sanitation District in Southern California.
[00:00:22] Piers Clark: Now we had Rob on our podcast about a year ago. Rob, it's brilliant to have you back again.
[00:00:28] Rob Thompson: Oh, happy to be back. Thank you.
[00:00:30] Piers Clark: Now we always start with a story about people's background, but you know what, because you've been here before, we've already had your background.
[00:00:36] Piers Clark: We've already known that you spent 30 years in OC San working your way up from the technical level, all the way to the top of the organization, and we know that you did some time in oil and gas in Alaska, which is probably why you are now down in California.
[00:00:51] Piers Clark: So, the question I want to ask you is about your management style. How has your management style changed over the last 30 years and what would you describe your management style as?
[00:01:02] Rob Thompson: I would describe my management style first and foremost as firm, but fair and a person who sweats the details. So what I mean by that is we're gonna talk about machines and how systems work together and infrastructure, but just as important as how do the people work together? How do we have a culture of accountability? How do we have a culture of innovation? How do we support each other across division and department lines?
[00:01:31] Rob Thompson: And to do that, I kind of look at the military model where you have to have discipline in how you're treating each other and how everyone is treated the same.
[00:01:41] Rob Thompson: As an engineer, I wanna make sure that people follow the details as much as I do. And as I've moved up obviously I need to relinquish more and more of that control and detail, but I want to know that those that are working in the positions across the organization are commanding the details. So I wanna be able to ask those questions and hear them give me the right answers.
[00:02:03] Rob Thompson: They don't have to do it how I do it. They don't have to say it the way I'd say it. But I want to be convinced that they control and command the details.
[00:02:11] Piers Clark: When you're talking to people, you are scratching a way to find if people actually have a solid understanding of what they're doing. And the reason I love what you've just described is, I dunno whether you recall a year ago when we did this, the tagline we gave was: "If it's installed, it'll better be working". It was the hook around the whole podcast of you know what, if we're gonna do something, let's do it properly.
[00:02:32] Piers Clark: Let's make sure we understand the detail. Let's make sure that we aren't building assets that we don't know how to operate and that we don't look after properly.
[00:02:40] Rob Thompson: It's incredibly important that we do this right 'cause trust is everything. And that's 24/7, 365, doing the right thing.
[00:02:48] Piers Clark: Alright, let's get straight into the topic of today. So, one of the things that OC San is very famous for is its groundwater recharge project. I want us to take the next few minutes talking about the groundwater recharge project and I'd like you to take me all the way back to the beginning.
[00:03:05] Piers Clark: When did this thing start and what were the ideas, what were the options that you had? Why did you do it? And what were the options you could consider?
[00:03:13] Rob Thompson: Orange County sits on a huge aquifer, so 2.5 million people sitting on top of this huge aquifer. So OC San has had a strategic partnership with the Orange County Water District, two completely distinct government agencies since really the 1970s where we started doing groundwater recharge with reclaimed water. Not indirect potable, but just reclaimed water. The two government agencies, water district, and the sanitation district have the same basic geographic boundaries. And we're blessed with this wonderful geology, but we have to keep the ocean out of our aquifer. So if we allow our aquifer to be over subscribed, if we're pumping it down, then the sea water's gonna pour right in and ruin the whole thing. So really since the thirties, Orange County Water District has been managing that aquifer, making sure it's full.
[00:04:06] Piers Clark: For the audience who aren't familiar with it, OC San serves 3 million people in Southern California. You are on the coast and like you say, you've got this big aquifer underneath, and of course if the water district is taking water out of the aquifer, you're creating a negative pressure, which will pull the sea water into the aquifer and runs the risk of contaminating, which is why you did the recharge.
[00:04:28] Piers Clark: So the recharge was to try and push back the sea water, is that correct?
[00:04:32] Rob Thompson: Correct. As we built that relationship in the late 1990s, we started to look at we were getting more and more water. There's a lot of discussion about climate change and the one thing about the climate is it's always changing.
[00:04:47] Rob Thompson: Back in the late nineties, we, OC San, thought we needed to build another outfall to have enough wet weather capacity to discharge all that water. So, we made the choice, rather than spend a hundred million dollars at the time on a new outfall, let's spend that money toward indirect potable reuse.
[00:05:07] Rob Thompson: Let's change the paradigm. Let's take what was wasted water discharged to the ocean, treat it in partnership with the water district and refill that aquifer that everyone's sitting on.
[00:05:19] Piers Clark: I've gotta ask, how did the public respond? 'cause this is 25, 30 years ago. You were pioneering a way forward at this time.
[00:05:27] Piers Clark: I can imagine that Californians might have been a bit antsy about this.
[00:05:32] Rob Thompson: We were not the leaders. We were actually third in line. City of LA was first and they were building a plant up in the North Valley and the moniker "Toilet To Tap" got hung on the project and it was killed.
[00:05:47] Rob Thompson: Orange County kind of learned from that. We understood that we weren't doing a technology project, we were doing an education project. So, we spent the next 4, 5, 6, really 25 years now, educating the public about the yuck factor and helping them understand you're either gonna get your water from the Santa Ana River or the Colorado River or the Sacramento River. All of which are water reused projects many times over. So do you want yucky old river water or do you want highly purified water that we can actually control 24/7, 365?
[00:06:25] Rob Thompson: And the people really went about understanding it. We talked at every opportunity to every group across the area, whether it was a city group, a nonprofit, service organizations helping them understand this was the best water that we were gonna put in the ground for them to drink.
[00:06:45] Piers Clark: I bet there were people in the media who just wanted to own this and paint you as the bad guys they must have done. They always is.
[00:06:51] Rob Thompson: It's easy. Yeah. Toilet to tap, yuck factor. All those things would come up, but in the end, people want water. And when you show them the difference in what's coming down the river versus what's coming out of this reverse osmosis, UV-disinfected effluent, it's a much better quality water.
[00:07:11] Piers Clark: Alright, so now let's talk about the treatment that you are doing and how clean was the water that was being discharged into the groundwater? What were the processes? Well, you've just mentioned them there, but let's walk through the treatment process.
[00:07:22] Rob Thompson: So we at Sanitation District receive the water, we do massive amounts of source control to make sure things like heavy metals aren't put into the water like pharmaceuticals and chemicals are controlled. So we have been doing that for years. We upped our game to go after even more of those chemicals, the things that we couldn't treat. So that's really the first step.
[00:07:43] Rob Thompson: Obviously we do our preliminary treatment screening, grit removal. We do gravity based primary treatment, biological secondary treatment. At that point, our water's good to discharge to the ocean, and we have some unreclaimable flows, which we don't wanna mingle with the drinking water system, but the majority of our water, 170 million gallons of the 185 is made available to the water district.
[00:08:08] Rob Thompson: They then micro filter, reverse osmosis treat, blast it with UV light, inject some peroxide, and it's good to go as indirect potable reuse. They have a barrier well system that they operate to keep the ocean water again from coming into that aquifer. And then a pipeline, which takes it up to their settling ponds where it percolates into the aquifer.
[00:08:31] Piers Clark: I wanna be absolutely clear on this. So you treat your effluent to final effluent quality stands. You then pass it over to the drinking water team, the clean water guys. They then do another treatment, it then goes into the aquifer. It doesn't go into the pipe system.
[00:08:45] Piers Clark: It's pumped into the aquifer at potable levels, and is then sitting in the aquifer. Now, do you know how long it stays in the aquifer?
[00:08:55] Rob Thompson: A minimum of six months by permit. No extraction, well can be within six months travel time of injection points.
[00:09:03] Piers Clark: And how long has this been running?
[00:09:05] Rob Thompson: We started activity in 2008 as a 70 million gallon a day facility. We upgraded around 2015 to a hundred million, and in late 2022, we upgraded to 130 million gallons a day.
[00:09:18] Piers Clark: And what do you know now that you wish you'd known at the beginning of the project?
[00:09:21] Piers Clark: Is there anything that you'd think this was a key learning that we had?
[00:09:25] Rob Thompson: I would say we didn't make the mistake, but the thing I'd pass along to you is if you're gonna get into this and you're gonna move forward, two things.
[00:09:34] Rob Thompson: Don't go cheap upfront to get your project started. If you know you're gonna start like with a 70 million gallon a day, but you're really building for 130, don't cheat yourself up front. Sure, you can add bays of membranes later, but make sure the pipelines that you put in are the right size. Don't save money upfront. Invest correctly for the full project.
[00:09:58] Piers Clark: Easy to say but actually, if it hadn't worked, well, you'd have had the asset for 70 and you'd have built the asset for 130 but you'd only be using 70% of it.
[00:10:08] Piers Clark: It is a bold move. You've gotta have real confidence that we're gonna work through any problems that come up. We're gonna work through, we're gonna solve them so that we do deliver the bigger picture.
[00:10:16] Piers Clark: I suppose you also didn't have much choice here. You needed this solution. You've got almost 3 million people who need w ater.
[00:10:23] Rob Thompson: Everyone needs water. And I've never heard anybody say, "Ugh, I'm so sorry. We have so much extra water." In today's world, you are always gonna need that pure source of drinking water. And the more the better.
[00:10:36] Rob Thompson: Even if we had a wet cycle come up , there's always a need for abundant water, whether it's agriculture or some new process or some opportunity for industry. I've never heard a case where people lamented the fact that they had much extra clean water capacity that they can't utilize.
[00:10:55] Piers Clark: Alright, tell me about the budget and the timelines and the construction and the build. Did it all go according to plan?
[00:11:01] Rob Thompson: Yes we worked very hard. I will say one of the early opportunities we had was the difference in culture between the two different agencies. We at OC San, at the time probably had a little more sophisticated project delivery system.
[00:11:18] Rob Thompson: We were accustomed to delivering bigger projects and a transparency with our board to say, this is what we think it's gonna cost, this is what you're buying into. So we had to kind of work through, making sure everyone understood the costs upfront and that, yes, we're gonna spend, I think at the time it was like $480 million to do that first 70 million gallons.
[00:11:41] Rob Thompson: But the upside is when we did those adder projects, they were just paid for by the water district because we're in the middle of that huge historic drought here in California, and they really wanted to get that water into production so they were able to finance their expansions. All our systems were good to go. We had plenty of water to give them.
[00:12:02] Rob Thompson: We had to modify some of our systems. We've actually converted our second plant in Huntington Beach to be a split system. I told you some water we don't want in the reclaim system. We get water in one pipeline, which comes from a Superfund site, which is an old chemical dump canyon where we're still cleaning it up. Some of that water comes to our system so we can treat it and safely discharge it.
[00:12:27] Piers Clark: That's brilliant, Rob. Last question on this topic, what advice would you give someone who was hearing this story and thinking, okay, I want to get on with this. What have I gotta do?
[00:12:38] Rob Thompson: I would say that don't limit yourself by thinking technology is the problem. Really think about educating those you serve and letting them know what's possible.
[00:12:49] Rob Thompson: We've solved the technology problem across the world for potable reuse. It's just a matter of helping people understand the value of the water and as they're using it, don't put things in it you don't want to drink because even if you're not doing potable reuse, somebody downstream of you is doing potable reuse.
[00:13:09] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Now, last time you were here, I ended by asking you what advice would you give your younger self? And I dunno whether you remember what you said. You said: "do the right thing, be patient and it will all work out."
[00:13:21] Piers Clark: You don't get the same question on your second podcast. I'm afraid. Rob, what would your superpower be and who would play you if they made a film of your life?
[00:13:32] Rob Thompson: So my superpower would be, I think intellectual and the ability to connect dots.
[00:13:38] Rob Thompson: I'm a super curious person with a great memory, so I dig into things just 'cause I wanna know how they work and that served me well because I can connect random dots and see where technology and regulation tend to be going, where some people might get hung up in the weeds, I can step back and connect those dots.
[00:13:59] Rob Thompson: As far as who would play me, I think because I have a bit of a dry sarcastic sense of humor. I would say probably Woody Harrelson. No, I'm sorry. That's you. I know you're the Woody Harrelson. I know you hear that all the time. But I would probably be Jerry Seinfeld or Tom Hanks. Those are the two I think that could deliver dry sense of humor.
[00:14:21] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Rob Thompson, General Manager at OC San in Southern California , and we've been talking about their Groundwater Recharge Project.
[00:14:34] Piers Clark: I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.